Shortly after September 11, 2001, political satirist
Bill Maher outraged sponsors and got his ABC talk show, Politically
Incorrect, cancelled
by agreeing with a guest’s observation that people who are willing
to die for their cause cannot be called cowards. Rather, lobbing missiles
from a safe distance is cowardly, Maher suggested. In the storm of
patriotic controversy that followed, much of the anger seemed to focus
on the
idea that there could be any comparison between the suicide attacks
and U.S. military action. But whatever distinctions may exist between
terrorism and legitimate armed struggle (and these seem harder to draw
as modern warfare blurs the distinction between civilian and military
targets), or between different contexts in which suicide bombing missions
have been carried out (Hamas is not Al-Qaeda), it seems hard to deny
that the willingness to lay down one’s life for God, country
or political convictions has significance.

This willingness—taken for granted in armed conflict—has
also been honored by those who embrace nonviolence. The history of nonviolent
movements includes many who knowingly risked their lives, such as U.S.
civil rights workers who faced brutal assault and, in some cases, death.
It includes leaders who, like Martin Luther King, Jr., were acutely
aware of the likelihood of their own martyrdom. It also includes a number
of “suicide resisters” who have taken their own lives and
generated their own controversy.

Self-immolation
The majority of nonviolent activists—especially those with roots
in Christian faith—would condemn self-inflicted violence as well
as violence directed toward others. Yet there have been some who, while
rejecting any act that would take others’ lives, have accepted
the deliberate ending of one’s own life for the sake of a cause.
The classic modern example is the self-immolation of the Vietnamese
Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who, on June 11, 1963, set himself on
fire at a busy intersection in Saigon to protest the U.S.-backed Diem
government’s repression of Buddhists. This was an act which, according
to University of Illinois sociologist Michael Biggs, brought self-immolation
into “the global repertoire of protest.” (Biggs is the author
of “Dying without Killing: Protest by Self-Immolation,” a
chapter of a book on suicide missions edited by Diego Gambetta, now
under consideration by Oxford University Press).

“The impact of Thich Quang Duc’s fiery death was immense
and immediate,” Biggs writes. “Within Vietnam, it galvanized
popular discontent in the cities. ...Four monks and a nun burned themselves
to death before Diem was toppled by a coup at the beginning of November.
This did not end self-immolation. ...Many more were to die in 1966,
protesting against the American-backed military regime and the war
destroying
their country.”

Several Americans—including two Quakers and a member of the Catholic
Worker movement—also immolated themselves during the Vietnam
war years.

While American peace movement leaders spoke out forcefully against
self-immolation, Vietnamese Buddhist leaders praised it. In a 1965
open letter to Martin
Luther King, Jr., Thich Nhat Hanh declared that “this is not
suicide.”

“What the monks said in the letters they left before burning themselves
aimed only at alarming, at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and
at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured then
by the Vietnamese,” he wrote. “To burn oneself by fire is
to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. ...The
monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he
desire nonexistence. ...He does not think that he is destroying himself;
he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the
sake of others” (Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of
Fire, 1967).

Biggs, who defines self-immolation as “an act of public protest,
where an individual intentionally kills him or herself—without
harming anyone else—on behalf of a collective cause,” says
that there have been more than a thousand acts of self-immolation worldwide
(not all by fire) since 1963. These have included Czechs protesting
the 1969 Soviet occupation of their country, Indian citizens protesting
a 1990 government proposal for caste-based reallocation of positions
in universities and government employment, and Kurds protesting Turkey’s
capture of Abdullah Ocalan in 1999.

In Biggs’ analysis, the core motivations of those who immolate
themselves focus on advancing their cause—either by appeal to
the perceived oppressor or to public opinion, by inciting other sympathizers
to bolder protest, or as a plea for divine intervention. He also notes
the role of despair for those who feel that all roads are blocked and,
in some cases, a desire to avoid capture or trial. He mentions—though
downplays—the possibility of selfish motivations or psychological
disturbances. (Biggs relates the findings of a psychiatric study of
22 survivors of self-immolation in India, which noted “manifest
psychopathology” in only one of the cases.)

Biggs says that while “most acts of self-immolation fail to generate
any collective response,” there are some, like Quang Duc’s,
which have “brought thousands or tens of thousands or even hundreds
of thousands of people together—to express their rage, grief and
commitment.” Even today, he reports, a memorial on the spot where
Quang Duc died is always adorned with flowers.

Fasts and Hunger Strikes
Biggs distinguishes self-immolation from hunger strikes on the basis
that, for hunger strikers, death is not intended. In fact, he says,
hunger strikers rarely starve to death.

A well-known exception was the 1981 hunger strike of 10 Irish Republican
prisoners, who died protesting the British government’s denial
of political prisoner status. More recently, 12 Kurdish prisoners died
in a 1996 hunger strike for more humane conditions in Turkish prisons.

Many hunger strikers have not been committed to nonviolence, except
as a temporary tactic. But fasts—of varying lengths and degrees
of intensity—have been a traditional practice of many nonviolent
leaders. Both Mohandas Gandhi and Cesar Chavez fasted in appeals to
their supporters for adherence to nonviolent means of struggle, as
well
as in appeals to their opponents. Washington, DC, anti-homelessness
activist Mitch Snyder fasted for 51 days in 1984 to pressure the federal
government to fund renovation of a shelter. (The outcome was successful,
but Snyder committed suicide several years later.) Activist Dick Gregory
undertook frequent fasts, and served as advisor to a group of protesters
who began an open-ended fast in 1972 to draw attention to American
involvement
in Vietnam.

“At the time, American soldiers were no longer dying in large
numbers, but there was a lot of bombing going on,” says Tom Lumpkin,
a Detroit Catholic priest who was one of the fasters. “We wanted
to make the suffering visible here in the U.S.”

Participants in the fast believed they might die, Lumpkin says, but
they eventually decided to stop fasting after 40 days, seeing a ray
of hope in the Democratic presidential nomination of anti-war candidate
George McGovern.

Peace Teams
While most nonviolent resisters in the U.S. have measured risk in terms
of jail time, loss of property or personal inconvenience, a new form
of nonviolent action has emerged in recent years which clearly involves
the risk of life. Beginning with delegations to Central America in the
early 1980s and continuing today with peace teams in Iraq and Israel/Palestine,
Americans and others have traveled to war zones, particularly those
in which there is some U.S. involvement, with the goal of nonviolent
witness and solidarity.

On March 16 of last year, Rachel Corrie, a student from Evergreen State
College in Olympia, WA, was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer
in Gaza as she stood in its path, attempting to prevent the demolition
of a Palestinian home. Corrie was a volunteer with the International
Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led project which invites international
volunteers to join in nonviolent direct action challenging the Israeli
occupation.

Corrie was “the first International Solidarity
Movement volunteer to be killed in this intifada,” an ISM press
release stated. “The
rationale of international protection rests upon the assumption that
Israel cannot remain unaccountable for the killing of international
civilians as it is unaccountable for the killing of Palestinians.
Today this assumption has been challenged.”

Corrie’s letters home expressed her conviction that, as an American,
she was far safer than the Palestinians with whom she engaged in nonviolent
resistance. But peace team volunteers have never assumed immunity.

In a 1984 speech to the Mennonite World Conference which laid the
foundation for the creation of Christian Peacemaker Teams, Mennonite
theologian
Ron Sider declared that “we need to prepare to die by the thousands” in
nonviolent conflict intervention.

“What would happen if we in the Christian church developed a new
nonviolent peacekeeping force of 100,000 persons ready to move into
violent conflicts and stand peacefully between warring parties in Central
America, Northern Ireland, Poland, Southern Africa, the Middle East
and Afghanistan?” Sider asked. “Everyone assumes that for
the sake of peace it is moral and just for soldiers to get killed by
the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Do we not have as much courage
and faith as soldiers?”

Although a force of 100,000 has yet to be marshaled, many peace teams
under a variety of auspices have engaged in impressive violence-reduction
projects around the globe. In November 2002, 110 delegates from 47
countries
met in New Delhi to launch what is perhaps the most ambitious such
project yet, establishing an International Peace Force to intervene
nonviolently
in conflict areas around the globe.

“The intention is to form a nonviolent standing army, which was
the vision of Gandhi,” says Janet Chisholm, vice chair of the
Episcopal Peace Fellowship, who participated in the gathering. Plans
call for the initial recruitment of 200 full-time salaried peace workers,
whose numbers would grow to 2,000 within 10 years, with volunteer reservists
augmenting their forces. Sri Lanka—which has suffered recurrent
conflict between Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus—was selected
as the site of a pilot project which began last June. The peace force
will “attempt to create a safe space so that people will feel
they can begin to have elections,” Chisholm says. “There
is going to be land reform, and that could evolve into great conflict.
It is a time when the different parties in Sri Lanka may be able to
develop a peaceful way of co-existing.”

This past year, the risk involved in the work of peace teams has
perhaps loomed larger than ever, as peacemakers have traveled to
Iraq.

A February journal entry by Elizabeth Roberts, a member of an Iraq
Peace Team (IPT) delegation sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness
reflected on questions delegates were asked to consider. The first
was, “In
the event of your death, do you agree to your body not being returned
to your own country but being disposed of in the most convenient way?” The
second inquired if they had written a letter that could be sent to
their loved ones in such an event.

“Some people here say the survival odds given to the American
peaceworkers staying through the invasion is about 30 percent,” Roberts
wrote. A core of peace team members is committed to remaining in Iraq
for the duration of the crisis.

Yet, although they have considered funeral arrangements and assembled “crash kits” (bottled water, dried food, flashlight, passport,
water purification tablets, ace bandage) for emergency use, IPT volunteers
make it clear that they do not wish to die. They reject the “human
shield” label claimed by other peace delegations, saying that
they “refuse to incorporate military language or ideas to describe
the peace witness of IPT members.”

Radical Freedom
For Christians, the willingness to risk one’s life flows from
the cross, nonviolent activist and theologian Bill Wylie-Kellermann
says.

“The call to discipleship is ‘take up your cross and follow
me,’ which clearly is a question of risk.”

Wylie-Kellermann stresses the link between the cross and engaging
the powers, describing Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as a freely chosen
confrontation that resulted in his death.

“There is certainly an element of choosing his timing, and freedom,
but on the other hand it’s consequence. It’s not suicide
because there are all sorts of freedoms at play around it—people
and authorities and powers could respond differently to what he’s
offering walking into town.”

The word “sacrament” comes from the Latin word “sacramentum,” which
was the Roman military oath to Caesar, Wylie-Kellermann says, and the
Roman authorities understood the Christian sacraments as signifying
an alternative allegiance.

“In baptism you die—it’s a baptism into the death
of Christ as well as the resurrection, and in many ways it’s like
the induction and the naming of this freedom. You’ve already died,
you’re free to die. It means you’re able to go into any
situation—you’re not only authorized but free.”
But there was also a “heresy of seeking martyrdom” in the
early church, Wylie-Kellermann says, with some Christians insisting
on being put into the arena.

“There’s kind of a line between this element of radical
freedom, and throwing yourself on the fire or lining up to take your
cross. It’s the difference between choosing risk within the context
of something else—risking in order to serve human life in some
way—versus taking a risk for your own justification. It leads
toward a kind of idolatry—idolatry of death, I suppose.

“I think of the Buddhists who immolated themselves and the really
careful self-purifying preparation they went through, and it really
was rooted in compassion and a desire to light up the history and make
visible the suffering of other people for the sake of peace. But I do
think it’s so easy to mix a fascination with death with an exposure
of death, or a kind of despair with an act of ultimate hope, and when
you get pushed to that extreme, they’re subject to confusion.”

In some ways, self-sacrifice in nonviolent action can be compared
to a soldier’s self-sacrifice, Wylie-Kellermann says.

“The folks who are on the ground in Iraq at the moment have to
have dealt with the prospect of their deaths, and made arrangements
and said goodbyes, the same ways that soldiers going off to the Middle
East are saying goodbyes. There is a kind of analogy between the risk
of the cross and the willingness of soldiers to die in battle.”

But there is also a fundamental difference, he says—as there is
between nonviolent self-sacrifice and the self-sacrifice of a suicide
bomber. “There’s a similar freedom obviously involved, and
the connection of the political powers to that element of risk, but
there’s an enormous difference between suicide bombing and the
nonviolent way of the cross—just like there is between a nonviolent
army and a military army. There’s just a categorical difference
between freedom to die in order to kill, and freedom to die in order
to offer life or justice or put a choice to people. They are not the
same thing.”

Marianne Arbogast, formerly the associate editor
of Witness for Peace magazine, is a freelance writer based in
Detroit. This article is reprinted from the May/June, 2003 issue of
Witness for Peace (www.thewitness.org).
Reprinted with kind permission.

In the third week of March 2003, as UN representatives,
embassy personnel and others were pulling out of Iraq in anticipation
of the U.S. attack, Jerry and Sis Levin, Episcopalians from Birmingham,
Alabama, were travelling in the opposite direction. As part of a delegation
to Iraq sponsored by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), they expected to
visit schools and hospitals, meet with representatives of various agencies,
and help document the effects of war on the Iraqi people.

Preparing to leave, Jerry Levin acknowledged that their plans might well
be disrupted by the U.S. invasion. They might or might not be able to
return home in two weeks. They might not return home at all.

For the Levins, the journey was a natural outgrowth of a commitment that
began in 1983, when Jerry Levin—then a broadcast journalist who
had just been named CNN bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon—was taken
hostage by Hizballah militants and held for nearly a year. During that
time, his wife, Sis Levin, engaged in a process of investigation and dialogue
on the roots of the conflict that eventually led to a meeting with the
foreign minister of Syria, shortly after which Jerry Levin was allowed
to escape.

Levin, who entered captivity an atheist, came out a Christian with a strong
belief in nonviolence. The experience convinced him of the “futility
of violence—not just the violence of the so-called bad guys, but
the violence of the so-called good guys, too. That’s how I understand
the meaning of the gospel, and especially the Sermon on the Mount.”

The Levins interrupted a two-year CPT commitment in Israel/Palestine to
respond to CPT’s call for experienced Middle East volunteers to
join the March delegation.

In Israel, Sis Levin, who holds a doctorate in education with an emphasis
on teaching peace, has been working on curriculum development at the Mar
Elias Institute in Galilee, a school that teaches Jewish, Muslim and Christian
students together. Jerry Levin has been working with CPT in Hebron.

“We’re a violence-reduction organization—our slogan
is ‘Getting in the Way,’” he explains. “We’re
constantly doing two things: documenting the excesses of the occupation
and its effects, and also going to where the problem of harassment and
violence against the Palestinians is at its worst and trying to help relieve
that problem, challenging soldiers when what they are doing is out of
line.”

In the process, he has been punched, kicked, spit upon, stoned, shot at
and chased by an army tank. When he focuses on risk reduction, however,
it’s in a much larger context than personal safety.

“We have procedures, as best we can, even under the most difficult
circumstances, to try to stop and look at what we’re doing—if
it’s right, if it’s effective,” he says. “One
of the questions, when we go into a potentially violent situation, is
will we, by our presence, make the situation worse or better? How does
one approach an Israeli soldier or settler at a volatile time in such
a way that it doesn’t inflame them more?”

Levin is uncompromising in his condemnation of all violence, whatever
its source.

“When our people drop bombs that kill civilians in Afghanistan and
in Iraq, naturally we won’t call it terrorism,” he says. “I
am so weary of all the rationales we officially put out for doing the
terribly violent acts we’ve done fulfilling our obvious national
ambition to dominate the world. It’s interesting that we call it
fanaticism on the part of Palestinians when these kids are willing to
blow themselves up, but we don’t call it fanaticism when our own
soldiers are willing to go into battle and take the chance of getting
killed, too.”

What of the risks he takes in attempting to prevent
violence?

“I do it because of the conversion process I went through in Lebanon,”
he says. “Sis and I passionately believe that the times do not call
out for any more Christian soldiers. Instead the times cry out for Christian
peacemakers, who are willing to risk proactive nonviolence.” —M.A.